Echo chambers, polarization, and Post-truth: In search of a connection

The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the post-truth heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically analyze C. Thi Nguyen's important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like political polarization, possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information.

Automated summary

The US population is becoming more divided along partisan lines, even on empirical issues. Theories explaining political polarization and other phenomena related to post-truth rely on social-epistemic structures like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. This paper critically analyzes C. Thi Nguyen's analysis of these structures and argues that his focus on cognitive mechanisms overlooks the effects of social-epistemic structures on our emotions.